The crisis in Syria may have pushed the Egyptian situation out of the news for now, but it is still urgent for Egyptian-Americans, especially the Coptic Christians who worship at St. George and St. Shenuda Coptic Orthodox Church on Bergen Avenue near Journal Square.

I arrived as they just returned from their annual parish vacation in Wildwood on the southern tip of the Jersey Shore. Amidst all the unpacking and disembarking from the bus, Emel Eskandar and Safurat Atalla could not speak fast enough to describe what is happening to the Christians in Egypt and their churches. “The people did not have power under Morsi,” said Eskandar, 54.

President Mohamed Morsi was elected with a slim 51 percent majority, but the Muslim Brotherhood was trying to Islamicize Egypt even more than it was under former President Hosni Mubarak, who was ousted in February 2011 and has been under house arrest until recently.

“The revolution by the military was to help the people,” Eskandar added. He believes that the people were also suffering economically and that a new government will assist the people.

Though Basma Guirguis has been in the United States for 42 years and raised her three children here, she still has cousins and relatives back in Egypt. She speaks with them regularly and describes the fear.

She said her cousin would go out early in the morning to do her shopping and then would stay home for the rest of the day. There was a 4 p.m. curfew, which has been pushed back to 6 p.m.

But she said there are fires, and banks and other businesses are being destroyed, and people are out of work. It is so bad that Guirguis’ church has been taking up collections to help family members back in Egypt.

Atalla was angry about the deliberate burning of churches and pulled out of his suitcase an Egyptian newspaper, “Voice of Belady,” which was mostly written in Arabic with some English stories. He turned to a montage of burning or burned churches on a full page and said, “Look, look what they do to the Christians.” Then he told me to take it so I would have evidence of what he was saying.

Father David Bebawy has been their spiritual leader for 27 years and has built up perhaps the largest Coptic Christian Church in the entire state. There are three altars in their converted Masonic Lodge to accommodate the large number of worshippers, who Bebawy counts in the thousands.

They also own the former Barrett’s Clothing store, which later became a Social Security office, on the next block. They occasionally use that space for worship. “Terrorist people took hold of Egypt,” said Bebawy about Morsi’s regime.

“The people were not better off after one year,” he added. “There was no safety but kidnappings and killings,” he asserted. He said as many as 200 churches had been burned in three days.

He said that people pray constantly for the Christians in Egypt and they offer prayers at their daily and Sunday services. There are four priests and a deacon who assist Bebawy. They are getting ready for their annual festival the last weekend of October and first weekend in November.

Guirguis, 66, will be there to help out as she has for the last four decades. She loves her church and this country. She immigrated because of the longtime prejudice against Christians, who at one time made up 10 percent of Egypt’s population.

She graduated from the American University in Cairo and could not find a job as a secretary after three years of searching. “They would always ask you your religion,” she recalled, “and when you said Christian, they would say, ‘We’ll call you,’ and they never did.”

She has happy memories of growing up in Egypt and speaks warmly of her Muslim neighbors. “We got along really well.” She believes that Egypt will now rebound. “It has to. This is the land of Jesus.”

Santora is the pastor of the Church of Our Lady of Grace & St. Joseph, 400 Willow Ave., Hoboken, 07030, fax (201)659-5833, e-mail: padrealex@yahoo.com